


Lies of Omission

by spiffykt



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Marauders, first wizarding war
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-15
Updated: 2014-07-06
Packaged: 2018-02-04 19:23:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1790404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiffykt/pseuds/spiffykt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By Lily Evan's second year at Hogwarts, news of the First Wizarding War began to seep through the school's walls in whispers and rumors, and war is a hard thing for children to understand. I expect this will turn into a few short ficlets about how the Wizarding War shaped Lily's time at Hogwarts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Letters Home

The common room was unusually quiet for a Saturday evening, and Lily Evans had secured a chair by the fireplace. Outside, the sun had mostly set, leaving only a dim red glow above the trees of the Forbidden Forest; inside, the flickering light of candles lit clusters of students, bent over homework or speaking in hushed tones. Lily held her Standard Book of Spells Grade Two on her lap, as a makeshift table on which to write her weekly letter to her parents.

> Dear Mum and Dad,
> 
> Everyone in Gryffindor is very sad this week, because a boy's parents were killed.

She frowned, fiddling with her quill. She wasn’t sure what had happened; it seemed no one would tell her, or maybe no one knew anything but the whispers and rumors that circulated the Great Hall and the common room every few weeks, of some or another scary thing. She had heard from classmates that there were people called Death Eaters who were behind the murder, or someone called You-Know-Who (Lily did not know who, but finding more information proved difficult.) Last month, someone had told her that the Death Eaters had attacked a Muggle family, but when she wrote her parents to ask they had assured her that it had been an accidental house fire: they had seen so on the news. She couldn't make any sense of it, so she moved on with her letter.

> I got high marks on the last potion we made again! We've been working on Forgetfulness Potions. I wanted to see what it tasted like, so I just tried a drop, and I almost missed Charms because I forgot that I had it! 
> 
> Say hello to Tuney for me.
> 
> Love,
> 
> Lily

She shook the letter to dry the ink, folded it up, and went to the portrait hole, past a group of seventh years whispering intensely. In the Owlery, her favorite of the school's owls, a friendly barn owl, was at his perch; she petted his head for a bit before tying her letter to his feet and watching him fly away.

 

Lily watched the owls arriving on Monday morning; her parents' letters were normally been like clockwork, a reply each Monday morning to each Saturday evening letter. She saw her favorite barn owl among the crowd of owls and pushed her bowl of porridge aside to make room for him to land. The owl, however, did not land on the Gryffindor table; he swooped instead to the Head Table, and landed in front of Professor McGonagall. Lily frowned and scanned the last few owls flying through the windows, wondering if perhaps she had been looking at the wrong one; but no, she recognized none of the others, and as the barn owl took off from the Head Table she looked again and was sure he was the one she had sent.

She felt nervous all through her morning Herbology class, wondering why her parents would be writing her head of house. Maybe it was a good thing, she thought. Maybe Petunia had done something magic after all, and her parents were telling the teachers so that she could come to Hogwarts also. But Dumbledore had seemed very sure when she had asked him, so perhaps not... That seemed to only leave bad options. She remembered back in September, when Professor McGonagall had pulled Elizabeth Smith out of History of Magic to tell her that her aunt had been attacked by Death Eaters, and looked anxiously at the door to the greenhouse, as if McGonagall might appear any moment bearing bad news.

No bad news came, however; not in Herbology, or at lunch, or in Charms that afternoon. "Stop worrying," her friend Marlene scolded her over dinner. "If it was something bad she would have told you already." Lily could not argue that point, but she couldn't help but nervously eye the Head Table.

Transfiguration was the following morning, and Lily fidgeted through the lesson on turning mice into snuffboxes. When class was finally dismissed, she gathered her things and hurried to the front of the room.

"Professor McGonagall, did my parents write you?" she asked in a rush.

McGonagall looked briefly surprised, but nodded. "They did," she said. "They were concerned about student safety. I assured them that there is no safer place than Hogwarts." 

The next morning, the barn owl returned, with a letter for Lily. It did not mention the Death Eaters; Lily noted bitterly that Petunia had not said "hello" back.

 

“Sev, what are the Death Eaters?” Lily asked. It was Friday afternoon; Slytherin and Gryffindor had Defense Against the Dark Arts together, and she and Severus had made a tradition of chatting together after class, since they couldn’t sit together at meals. It was too cold for them to stroll outside anymore, so they wandered the halls instead, reminding each other to avoid trick stairs.

“They’re sort of like a Pureblood club,” Severus said confidently. “They want to change things at the Ministry, make it less stupid.”

“Oh.” Lily said.

“I’m sure they would let you in, though,” Severus added quickly. “You’re great at magic.”

“What do they do?” Lily asked.

“They want us to be allowed to use more Dark magic, not just the dumb defensive spells we learn,” Severus said, looking delighted at the idea.

Lily frowned. “Isn’t dark magic banned for a reason?” she asked.

Severus shook his head. “The Ministry just says that to keep people from using the most powerful spells,” he said. “We have all this magic and they don’t even let us use it.”

“Do you think the Death Eaters killed Albert’s parents?” Lily asked.

Severus scowled. “You shouldn’t listen to stupid rumors,” he said. “People don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Lily felt a bit relieved; Severus seemed to know about these things, and while she didn’t think a pureblood dark magic club sounded very friendly, it was at least less ominous than the whispers in the common room implied.

“Have you started the History of Magic essay yet?” Severus asked.

The thought of the two rolls of parchment on the Gargoyle Strike, which she had not in fact started, pushed the week’s whispers from Lily’s mind entirely. 


	2. Slug Breath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> James bullies Severus in potions class, and Severus gets him back. Lily is irritated at both of them.

That morning in Potions with the Slytherins, James Potter had spent the entire class flicking dungbombs into Severus’s cauldron under the cover of the misty fumes the brewing potions produced. The potion they were working on wasn’t pleasant-smelling to begin with, but Sev’s quickly became unbearable. The fine mist was replaced with heavy brown clouds, smelling strongly of dung and clinging humidly around anyone near. By the time Professor Slughorn had vanished the potion, Severus’s long hair looked even damper than usual and stank so badly Lily could smell it from two tables away.

“What on earth did you put in that cauldron, boy?” Slughorn demanded, waving his hand in front of his face to dispel the lingering dungbomb fumes. 

“It wasn’t his fault!” Lily interrupted. “Potter was throwing dungbombs at him!”

“I was not,” Potter said. His hands were in his pockets, hiding the dirt left from the bombs, but it looked no different from his usual arrogant posture, leaning back against the table with hands in robes. “That’s just Snivellus’s natural aroma.”

“Now now, none of that,” Slughorn tutted. “There’s no time to remake it today, Mr. Snape, so please make it up as homework and hand it in next class. The rest of you, finish up and hand in your vials after motherwort has finished steeping.”

Lily checked her hourglass timer, then glanced back over her shoulder. Severus looked miserable, slumped in his seat in front of his empty cauldron. He was flipping through his potions book, looking particularly irritated at it, and Lily didn’t doubt that the real target of his annoyance was Potter and Black, still giggling to themselves at the next table over. 

She thought they might walk to lunch together, but Severus threw his books into his bag and hurried out of the room as soon as the bell rang, while the rest of them were still handing in their potions. She didn’t think anything of it until the throng of students was reaching the stairs up from the dungeons. Potter and his silly little gang were the first to reach the steps, and were halfway up when a blast of – something – erupted from the nook in the wall. Potter tumbled back down the stairs, landing at the feet of a gaggle of distressed-looking Slytherin girls, who grew all the more distressed when he started puking slugs on their feet.

Severus poked his head out of the nook and gestured to Lily. She looked wide-eyed between the puking Potter – Pettigrew had run to fetch Slughorn – and the expectant Severus, and then hurried up the stairs, following him away before the professor could arrive.  
“What WAS that?” she demanded as they rushed towards the dining hall.

“Slug-vomiting charm,” Severus said. “I wanted to try something more complicated – I found this one that turns the target into a sea urchin –“ 

“SEV,” Lily cut him off. “Will he be okay?”

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Severus said dismissively. They had reached the doors of the Great Hall, and he hesitated, twisting his fingers in his dungbomb-scented hair.

“You go ahead,” he muttered, all the triumph of his jinx gone from his voice. “Not hungry.” 

And before Lily could object, he skulked back towards the dungeons and the Slytherin common room. 

But Potter’s antics and Severus’s mood and frankly distressing knowledge of hexes weren’t even the end of it, because Lily had barely started eating when Black and Pettigrew burst into the Great Hall and made a beeline for her. Or rather, Black burst, and Pettigrew trailed, fidgeting in the background while Black demanded: “Where is he?”

“Who, Potter?” Lily asked coolly. “I thought he was with you.” 

“Remus took him to the hospital wing,” Pettigrew offered helpfully, but Black yelled over him.

“You know who I mean! That slimy, greasy-haired git…” 

“Blood traitors and mudbloods making a fuss in the Great Hall,” a chilly voice said, interrupting Black’s rampage. Lucius Malfoy had snuck up behind him. He well towered over the second years, and his prefect’s badge gleamed on his chest as if he’d polished it. “That’ll be five points each from Gryffindor, I think.” Before they could argue, he’d glided away, rejoining Avery and Mulciber at the Slytherin table, who were laughing like points off Gryffindor was the best joke they’d ever heard.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Lily hissed. “Go shout somewhere else, Black.” Luckily, Marlene arrived at just that moment, slipped into the seat next to Lily, and began describing the aftermath of Severus’s curse in such detail that Black could not have gotten a word in edgewise even if he’d wanted to. He shot Lily a final glare and skulked off. 

“What did he want, by the way?” Marlene asked when she’d finished her story, which included quite a bit more vomiting slugs onto Slytherins and some admiration of the quality of the hex by a baffled Slughorn.

“Oh, probably to find Sev so he could get a hex of his own in,” Lily sighed. “Wouldn’t do any good really, Severus knows tons more than he does.”

Marlene rolled her eyes. “Someday they’re all going to curse each other to death,” she proclaimed, and turned her attention to the plate of sandwiches in front of her.

Across the table, a fifth year was spreading out the Daily Prophet, showing an article to another student – “A ministry worker stole a whole bunch of dark artifacts out of the Auror Office yesterday. Just walked right out with them.”

“Why on earth?” the other asked, frowning at the little column of text.

“No idea,” the first said. “They haven’t been able to find him, it’s like he just vanished. Was acting perfectly normal right up until it too, none of his coworkers noticed anything odd.”

“Bizarre,” the second said.

“Hey, do you think Potter will be in Transfiguration?” Marlene asked, shaking Lily from her eavesdropping.

“I hope not,” Lily said. “He’ll probably have slug breath. “


End file.
